Tools to Predict and Monitor Competitor&nbspTraffic

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Today we're going to break down a number of different tools and resources for getting insights into competitors traffic data. We have looked at a handful of tools here and will break them down one by one as to their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the validity and usefulness of the data provided. Ultimately we just wanted to share with you some other information sources out there that you can add to SEOmoz's list of tools that are great for competitor analysis (my personal favourites being the Linkscape Visualization and Comparison tool as well as the Competitive Link Research tool).

However, I have had a number of clients asking me for a better view of overall market size and what kind of traffic their competitors are getting. Despite the fact that this has, unfortunately, at times meant crushing a few dreams about who a genuine/realistic competitor is or should be (i.e. NOT mashable if you are a new site) it can be tricky to find meaningful predictive data even when you know who your competitors are.

The Failed Experiment

Initially I wanted this to be an experiment testing out a number of services and running them against Analytics data to compare like for like and find which sites provided the most accurate information. I compiled Analytics data from 25 websites with hopes of comparing the real numbers (from Analytics) against the predictions of the other tools to try to find which was the most reliable across a number of sites from different sectors with a range of monthly traffic from ~1,000 monthly visitors to over 48,000,000 monthly visitors.

The idea was to report on data across a number of these platforms for average monthly visits, total yearly visits, geographical visits and so forth. Unfortunately, there were many fewer tools that provided this data than I initially anticipated and it quickly became clear that we weren't going to be able to compare apples to apples and there is no substitute for internal data... but through the combination of some of the below tools you can get a good idea of what sort of traffic your competitors sites are getting.

So, the experiment was a bit of a failure, but I learned more than my fair share about the tools so let's have a look at which tools are available and which tasks/comparisons they can be used for. I'm hanging on to all the data I collected and at a future date (if I ever hear back from some of the data sources) I will post a follow-up/re-do of the experiment.

The Tool Belt

It is worth pointing out that a number of these sites suggest they can provide better data if you claim the site(s) in question. I cannot testify to the accuracy of this because we have not looked into this (and could not feasibly claim the data for all 25 sites), also, all comments are based upon the free version of the tools as we did not have paid access to any of the tools.

Alexa

Strengths:Alexa is good for comparing different sites traffic and for monitoring general traffic trends. It can be quite useful for comparing one site to a competitor site (up to 5 sites at a time).
The index is massive and contains some data about all of the 25 sites we tested.

Weaknesses:
Not so great for the smaller sites. As you can see below, you won't get any of the traffic charts for sites ranked outside of the top 100,000 (which means if you Alexa thinks you are getting any fewer than 10,000 visits per month you're unlikely to glean any great information.

Accuracy is a serious concern. This does taint the usefullness of the tool in general.

The numbers reported are not helpful for predicting traffic on their own.

Accuracy:

We want to keep this all anonymous but let's just say one site that we know gets 10-20,000 visits per month had an Alexa rank that was more than 5 times better than a site that we know gets 75,000+ visitors per month. And this was not just a one-off event.

I would have to seriously quetsion the reliability of this tool. It didn't seem to be too bad at predicting the trends for a single site but the charts are extremely difficult to make any real use of. The information on bounce rate seems fairly accurate (give or take a few percent) but the trends for bounce rate seemed much less accurate (e.g. the ups and downs did not seem to correspond with similar peaks and valleys in Analytics).

Perhaps most interestingly it seems to be skewed in favour of sites within the search marketing space. Sites in the search marketing space that we looked at regulary outranked sites receiving more than 10 times as much traffic on a monthly basis.

How to best use Alexa?
The tool is interesting for comparing similar sites or sites within an industry. I would like to recommend the tool but based upon my experience and this particular data set I would have to say I would be very cautious about using this to make any meaningful suggestions or estimates on traffic data. It is a great concept for a site but does not seem to have been particularly accurate.

The most accurate data seemed to be the data from the visitors by country (the order was fairly accurate and the percentages we looked at were not to far off). To the extent that this data would be useful to have for your competitors this would be one good use of Alexa data.

The insights for audience demographics could also potentially be extremely valuable, though accuracy will always be a question.

Compete

Weaknesses:
Accuracy
Somewhat limited number of sites - many sites that it classifies as "low sample sites"
Cost of "Pro" option

Accuracy:
Again, accuracy is a serious concern here. The data was off in some cases by as much as 2,000% for monthly visits. The accuracy seemed to be a bit better for the peaks in traffic and some of the general trends we looked at, but was certainly not reliable enough for us to suggest reporting competitor traffic based upon this information.

How to best use Compete?
It should come as no surprise that Compete is best used for comparing competitors. The scale of the data is way off but some of the trends seemed to be fairly reliable. I wouldn't advise reporting any numbers from this data (as they do not seem close/reliable at all - often off by a factor of 2 or more), however the trends are reliable. The information could be meaningfully used to look into seasonal trends between competitors. The demographic information (again, not being able to comment on the accuracy) would also be quite interesting but would require registering your site.

I can't very well recommend the PRO services as I was not able to gain access and was unwilling to pay the cost just for the blog post. I would be extremely interesting in looking further into some of the referral data and the keywords data but this is not available as part of the standard free toolset.

Cost: Free. The PRO membership is $499 per month.

ComScore

Unfortunately we struggled with ComScore. We were unable to get a login or sneak a peak at any of the data. Thus, obviously we cannot comment on the validity of the data, only some of the offerings.

Strengths:
N/A

Weaknesses:
N/A

Accuracy:
N/A

Best use of ComScore:
ComScore offers a number of reports and insights into markets including reports on Local market size, as well as information about valuable/important keywords in an industry. It would be very interesting to find out where this data was coming from and how good it was, but we were not able to achieve this in time to publish this information.

Cost: N/A
Costs were not listed on the site, but rather suggest contacting ComScore directly.

Google Ad Planner

Strengths:
Sites also visited data is good
Keywords searched for can be quite valuable
Audience interests data interesting

Weaknesses:
Accuracy
Lack of data for small sites

Accuracy:
The accuracy was really mixed. For many of the sites AdPlanner provided much better data than some of the others, however, they were still off by miles for some sites - off by as much as 1000%. Again, the data on this in general tended to be better than many of the others, but given the occassional "big miss" I would not be comfortable using this data to make traffic predictions for a client.

How to best use Google Ad Planner:
The data about other sites visited as well as keywords searched for (with affinity) could be extremely valuable. As well as some of the other metrics reported on and audience interests. However, the traffic data is not particularly meangingful and is not to be relied upon.

Pro-tip: The data tends to be better when site owners have granted permission to analytics to publish data, I know we all love open and friendly, but this isn't the sort of thing you neccessarily want to make easier for your competitors to find.

Google Insights

Weaknesses:
Difficult to read the data
No hard and fast numbers about traffic
Hard to compare entire sites to one another

Accuracy:
You can bet that the accuracy of this data is going to be pretty good given that the data provider has access to more data than anyone else on the internet. However, the fact that the numbers are normalised and more designed for keyphrases and search terms and trends than for traffic data means that the search volume will correspond perfectly with the traffic to a site.

How to best use Google Insights:Google Insights could be quite helpful for finding the most valuable pockets of keyphrases and keyphrase groups. This could be particularly valuable when looking at a competitor site and trying to figure out which of their keyphrases are driving the most traffic. Further to that point, it could help you see which of the keyphrases within a keyphrase group might be the most valuable.

Cost: Free.

Google Trends for Websites

Strengths:
Good for illustrating magnitudes of difference between sites
Allows comparison of multiple websites
Includes regional information

Weaknesses:
Not good for comparing sites fairly similar in size
Does not have information for smaller sites when logged in
Accuracy imperfect
No numbers*

Accuracy:
The data seems to be more accurate when only trying to compare traffic from search, it does not seem to do as well in picking the winning recipient of overall traffic. Given that these trends are Google Trends this is reasonable and still paints a fair landscape for an SEO's needs.

When comparing websites with drastically different traffic numbers the rough visual estimation appears to correspond quite well with the observed analytics data as well.

It's a shame there are no actual numbers for the data, but that would just be too easy.

How to best use Google Trends for Websites?
Trends is great for broad information gathering. It gives some insite into similar searches when comparing sites, and in general it is unlikely that you will find better comparative data out there without direct access to your competitor's analytics account. However, Trends does not provide numbers and thus can only be used to venture a guess at what sorts of numbers competitors are pulling in.

When two sites are relatively similar in size Google Trends does not always pick the winner in terms of monthly traffic correctly. For example, one of the sites we tested received around 7.5m monthly visits whilst another received around 8m and Google ranked the 7.5m website higher. However, it is worth noting that the 7.5m visitor site received considerably more volume from search than did the 8m visitor site so from an SEO standpoint this data is probably quite accurate.

Edit 22/11/2010 at 13:47 GMT:

Thank you very much to Jest for pointing out that this information was originally written and summarised when logged out of Google. When visiting the site logged in it does provide data (i.e. numbers/ranges). This information makes the tool considerably more valuable. I must point out that I have not had time to run this across the entire data set, though it is worth pointing out that even with the information the data looks to be off on a few of the sites I have checked. It is not as far off as the data for the same sites using AdPlanner, but still considerably far off (e.g. reporting 140k visits for a site that receives ~320k unique visits daily).

HitWise

Unfortunately we were not able to get data from HitWise in time. The HitWise team was very helpful, responsive and agreeable and we will share this data once we have gotten our hands on it. However, we had not received the data back on the websites in the study in time for publication.

Strengths:
N/A

Weaknesses:
N/A

Accuracy:
N/A

Best use of HitWise:
HitWise, similarly to comScore works on a reporting basis insofar as you speak to them about the types of market reports you would like or you can create custom reports. Whilst we obviously cannot comment on the accuracy of the data the services offered look to be better tailored to an SEOs needs than do the reports offered by comScore. However, generally speaking HitWise will not work with agencies which will be a bit of a bummer for some of you.

Cost: Free-$695+ per report
The range in cost seems to be fairly large. Whether the data warrants the pricing structure cannot really be judged without looking at the data, though they do make some data freely available through their website.

Accuracy:
Definitely the biggest shortcoming of the Quantcast data is accuracy. As with some of the other sources the traffic data is estimated and is nowhere near accurate on the sites for which Quantcast had any data. Data was off by as much as 10 times the actual analytics data for some of the sites. Again, I cannot say that I would recommend sharing any of the data with a client as an accurate predictor of a competitor's traffic.

Best Use of Quantcast:
Although the data is not particularly reliable for the traffic data some of the other tools the site has to offer seem quite interesting and worth further investigation. The demographics information is also particularly interesting because it provides a reference as to how the data compare against the internet average. This sort of data could be particularly valuable for analysing a market by compiling data across multiple sites.

Cost: Free.

SEMrush

Strengths:
Data Includes sites of all sizes
List of Keyphrases and rankings for thos terms
Most accurate numbered data of all tools looked at

Weaknesses:
Data imperfect
Pay to get full data lists
Data only for Google traffic

Accuracy:
The data was not perfectly accurate, though generally speaking SEMrush did not miss the mark for any of the sites we tested the same way a number of the other tools did. This is, obviously not to say that this data is infallible or that there won't be some issues with some sites, but the data was surprisingly accurate. As with some of the Google data the information reported is just the Google SE traffic, but this is our main area of focus and was quite accurate when drilling down into that specific area of traffic within analytics.

Best Use of SEMrush:
Although imperfect, this tool came the closest to providing accurate data that I would at least with a word of warning, be willing to share with a client about potential expectations or about where there competitors may be traffic wise. Most importantly, the add-on options and ability to see the keyword lists and how the competitor ranks for these terms is extraordinarily appealing to me.

Cost: Free-$499 per month

Conclusion

I hope that the findings from all this research will be valuable to you. At the end of the day it is an incomplete study and I look forward to following up on it when I have another big chunk of time and if/when I get access to comScore, HitWise, Compete PRO and SEMrush Pro. For the time being I would rely most heavily on SEMrush for predicting traffic and estimating how well a competitor is doing, but all of these tools add something to the ever growing toolbelt even if it may be for a purpose other than that which I was hoping they would achieve for me - we all know I love to misuse tools and I'm sure I will come up with some creative ways to use these insights.

Thanks a lot and look forward to any feedback you might have in the comments below or feel free to contact me on Twitter.

About SamuelCrocker —
Sam is Managing Director at Conversion.com and is based in London. Looking out for what stops our clients' users from converting, and fixing it. He occasionally posts thoughts on digital marketing on his personal blog.

Thanks Sam. This post is a great resource to try and get some data to work with. Interesting how Google (the Tech giant) seems to provide incorrect (misleading) numbers. Surely they have the tools and data to improve accuracy.

Am I correct in my conclusion that there is no accurate data available, but the combination of the mentioned tools can give you a strong indication?

It is very unlikely that you would need to know exactly how many visitors a competitor receives, but being able to estimate (and perhaps more importantly trust this estimate) would be helpful for a couple of reasons.

1. If you are competing with another site for advertising it would certainly be helpful (at a minimum internally) to take a guess as to what sort of traffic your competitors could generate and why the advertiser should pick you.

2. If a client would like to know what sort of traffic they should realistically hope for or what kind or volume there is out there in a particular industry these tools can be quite helpful - you don't need exact numbers but when a tool is telling you 2 million visits a month and in reality the site receives 48 million a month this can really mess up expectations (and would be notably worse if the opposite were true).

So, yes, unfortuantely the conclusion is that none of the tools are 100% reliable. A combination of the tools could hopefully give you a fairly good estimate, but ultimately SEMrush would be the one to which I would refer based upon the results in this study in terms of finding Google traffic.

You should probably have Nielsen Net Ratings on here also, and then put it next to ComScore and Hitwise for sites you would not have been able to get access to, but it should be on the list. Also SpyFU.

As I have access to Nielsen, Hitwise and ComScore I can speak to them a little.

Nielsen and ComScore have fairly intuitive interfaces, I happen to prefer Nielsen, but ComScores is just fine. They both have some really nice advanced features, especially in trafic overlap area and site comparison data. Because they are panel based, they de-dupe uniques (or at least they make a good attempt at it) because if you are on the panel, it means you are tracked at both work and home. So their unique visitor data is going to be lower than your own analytics. Because the data is sampled from panels that I believe are both still under 30,000, the smaller the site, the less accurate it is. The major drawbacks of course are that these are $50k + a year packages. But great if you can get your company to pay for them.

HitWise is also a panel, but it is different in two significant ways. It does not roll up sub-domains, so all sub-domains are listed seperately, and there is no way to de-dupe that. This is both beneficial and difficult, depending on how your set up. Also, like Alexa, there are no hard numbers, it is all based on reach.

A note on Quantcast. If a site is verified, then it has the Quantcast tags on it. This theoretically means that it should be about as accurate as Google Analytics. I work with many sites that have both Quantcast and GA on them, and they tend to be within 5% of each other. If a site is not verified by Quantcast, then it is about as realiable as any panel that is sampled...the more traffic the more accurate usually.

One last note, Compete and Alexa both used incentivized panels (ComScore does also in its broader panel, but claims that data is kept seperate from its primary product). I would always be a little leery of incentivized panels as their behavior may not always be natural, and thus taint the data some.

Wow, thank you for this thorough addition! Definitely nice to hear (even anecdotally what some other people's experiences have been). Thanks also for mentioning the other tools, I will definitely try to include them in any follow-up research.

Likewise, when working on sites getting 1MM+ visits per month, comScore data are quite accurate, adjusting for the panel selection methodology (unique visitors from the U.S.). Price point is tough for most small businesses - $60K per year upwards.

2. Compete (and maybe hitwise) calculates ISP traffic data and has little amount of information about international visitors. These might be important for sites with international audience (aka AUS/UK and others).

Re Alexa in particular, I generally find the data massively skewed to users from the sub continent. I have had clients come to me concerned after looking at Alexa rankings that 30-40% of their traffic is coming from India and surrounding regions only to find when looking at the Google Analytics that it is much more like 2-3%.

Where the data for Alexa (I believe) is all toolbar driven, and the majority of their toolbar users (or a significant portion) are based in the sub continent, I have typically found it hard to glean much in the way of useful information from Alexa.

Good post though, not tried all of these out, will have to find some time to evaluate a bit further for myself.

Thanks Pete! I didn't see a noticeable amount of that for the sites I was looking out (or at least it didn't stick out, perhaps because at least the order of the country audiences was roughly correct even if some of the percentages were skewed). Very interesting to have this though! Cheers.

If you are in a different market too alot of these tools provide very poor data as they are very focused towards the US market. I deal with the australian market and its a struggle to get some accurate data I mean Alexa can pull these statistics yet if you try and compare a website which is popular with teenagers and a website which is popular with webmaster the data is going to be crazy wrong becuase theirs no way teens have the alexa tool bar installed. Data from hit wise for the AU market can be a little better yet it is not cheap at all to track it.

Thank you very much for pointing this out... that one definitely slipped through my radar so much appreciated. I will edit the post to reflect this and include this in any follow-up research I do. For what it works the data still looks a fair bit off (would have to rerun it over the whole set to see how far off) and it does raise the issue that for smaller sites you will not be able to find data.

The Competitive Link Research Tool is a really useful tool when it functions, but I'm mourning the demise of a tool I found even more beneficial.

The seoMoz Juicy Links report, which no longer functions and is apparently being deprecated, was a phenominal tool for discovering quality link opportunities that were often not being used by competitors, and so often more valuable for that.

Looking for link opportunities to target my employer's 'Christmas Gifts' pages I could run a report on terms like 'christmas traditions', 'xmas fun' and the like, and get up to 200 thematically related sites that were not already heavily populated by other gift retailers.

It was a gem of a tool and will be missed. If anyone knows of an alternative I'd love to know about it.

Echoing what Gianluca said, this tool - http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php - is actually better IMO (performs many searches rather than just one). The output doesn't create the spiffy list, but we're working on that now to help replace the feel of Juicy Link Finder.

Oh, and http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect is also good. Don't forget, you can plug in sites that aren't direct competitors and get a lot more results (try, for example, resource sites/blogs/directories in your sphere).

Just a note for Rand: right now the format that links out directly to the Serps is better for people not exclusively looking for english keywords related sites. Infact, with just few tweaks I can easily transform for other language search (for instance changing "en" with "es" and words like "directories" with "directorios"...)

Gianluca, Rand, thanks for the feedback. I do have Pro Membership through my day job, so I'm up to speed with most of the tools, however I've not got round to testing out Link Aquisition Assistant as yet so I'll give that a spin in the morning. I still can't overstate how useful I found Juicy Links, tho' - I've landed some great editorial links as a result of that tool. Going after links from sites our competitors have bagged is not without merit, but the lateral thinking you could apply to Juicy Links allowed quite a competitive edge IMHO. I'll look forward to using it's replacement. Thanks again for the advice, it's greatly appreciated.

Amen. I'm using quite a lot of SEO tools; SemRush, Ahrefs, SilmilarWeb, Serpstat are among them. While I use some of them for keywords and competitors' research (actually, it's the only way you can benefit from these tools) they are pretty useless for accurate measurement of page's traffic - they only give you estimation based on number of possible visitors per month if the keywords for whichsaid pages are ranked will hold their positions in SERP. This include searching trends and has some other minor "corrections to azimuth") but still inaccurate like taking a piss in a field on a windy day.

Hi! Are you the same Royh who is the head SEO at SimilarWeb (looking at the post at http://blog.similarweb.com/author/royh/). If so, you're welcome to comment about your own site here, but please do disclose any affiliation you have with the company.

Sam, accuracy and shortcoming are the operative words as it relates to Quantcast. But, accuracy and shortcoming is a problem on your part. You failed to point out the difference between estimate and Quantified (measured). You left your readers to believe that accuracy is the biggest negative. For estimated sites, I totally agreed. But you never clue to your audience that there more than estimated sites. You should have tested pr know about it before you blog it to the world.

Measured sites are similarly to Google Analytics with embed tags in pages.

The thing is, you blog from an authorative standpoint. Resulting, your audience will tend to believe you. And you did make an analysis and determination about the accuracy. That is your shortcoming. You totally failed in your blog from a standpoint of research.

I use Google Trend,Insights and Adwords:keyword tool. They are all a bit vague though and I do question the figures from the adwords tool, especially for ‘local monthly search’ volumes with all their changes in their 'Algo' for GEO searches.

I would like to see a post on how to use the keyword tool properly and the whether or not it is accurate. I can do a simple search there but I have trouble figuring out how to use the data that I find.

Somehow your delusion - as you say the experiment was somehow a sort of a failure - is mine too.

And it is amplified by the fact that mostly my clients' sites are small ones with not a huge amount of traffic... and also those ones that can be considered important does not have that volume of traffic to make them "look big" to many of the tools you cited in post.This can be a problem for every language and country who does not have for simple "population quota" the % of internet users English and English based websites do have.

Especifically, talking about the Google tools, what drives me crazy is the normalization they use in order to quantify numbers, traffic and trends... that makes quite hard to extrapolate real numbers. And a problem referred to italian is that also for quite common keywords Google Trends cannot show you really useful numbers (you know: when all numbers are 0 or 1... how the hell)

Ad Planner is maybe the tool I use the most, mostly in order to target users in a niche or market not really to make competitive analysis... in that sense, as you, I rely more on the SEOmoz Lab tools.

The big conclusion I personally find from this post (and while waiting the other you promised in your tweet), is that this particular analytic aspect is something that still have to find a real solution able to give the most accurate predictive numbers about traffic.

Post Scriptum: I wish you the best for your new SEO adventure. Stay in touch here (you know: YOUmoz :))

Of the tools mentioned I only use insight/trends. I use it to check the Google Keyword tool, by comparing the traffic line for a keyword where we rank consistently so I know what sort of traffic volumes we get, against an unknown keyword that we plan to optimise for.

Thanks very much for your comment. I agree that it is worth being cautious with my findings (it wasn't a massive sample size or anything) but my main thrust was just that people should be cautious in providing these sorts of estimates to clients based on the imperfect nature of the tools presently available.

I would love to hear a bit more by what you mean by comparing apples to oranges though? Would you be willing to elaborate a bit please?

The main problem stems from differences in how metrics are defined. Despite the best efforts of organizations like the IAB, and the WAA, there aren't official definitions for metrics like a "visit," a "page view," or a "unique visitor." Audience measurement tools each tend to define these things slightly differently.

Even when these tools appear to measure the same variables, they often have very different ways of obtaining the data. For instance, Alexa's "Daily Reach" metric is a single-day measurement, and cannot be compared with monthly "unique visitor" counts without detailed data on visitation frequency. Compounding the problem is that services like Compete and Quantcast (with caveats) report US data only.

Finally, cookie-based (and server log-based) web analytics are not as accurate as we commonly make them out to be. It's inappropriate to treat directly measured data as "real," and third-party tools as "estimates." Really, both methods should be considered estimates of a construct, with varying degrees of accuracy.

Thank you very much Sean! This is clear and does make a great deal of sense - I totally agree with the senitment.

I think this is a key point that I considered about this test (Will and I were discussing this specifically about Hitwise) but something I did not make clear in the post so Im glad you raised this.

I guess I quite often get bogged down in the "managing expectations" part of the job and because quite often people I have worked with rely so heavily on analytics data I tend to overlook the difference here and the potential impact of stuff like the fact that Google Preview (and undoubtedly loads of other types of activity) can skew data.

I do think that this is a valid concern, however, I do think from the study I did there is still some data that these tools provide that are so far off what a client would likely see in their own analytics that I would be very hesitant to give them these figures for any other sites even as rough estimates.